Chapter 10
In: Brill's Companion to Classics and Early Anthropology
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Abstract
This chapter examines the impact of Pausanias’ Periegesis, and Frazer’s translation of it, on early archaeological investigations of the Greek landscape. For Pausanias, the material ruins of the Greek landscape presented a way of reconciling the past and his contemporary present (Stewart 2013); this model also served as the basis for the modern engagement of the nascent nation of Greece’s place within later European culture. Early nineteenth-century western European travellers to Greece—such as Curtius, Leake, and Dodwell—arrived at the same time as a shift in the reception of Pausanias’ text, facilitated in English due to Sir James Frazer’s translation and commentary (1898). The scholarly emphasis moved away from an overt reliance on selected excerpts to a reading of the text in its broader context, which included first-hand fieldwork experience of relevant archaeological sites mentioned in the ancient text.
The transition from antiquarian to archaeological investigations in Greece in the nineteenth century was facilitated in part by frequent reference to the topographical writings of Pausanias (Wagstaff 2001). At the forefront of these antiquarian approaches was the idea of autopsia, or “seeing for oneself”, and the idea that had deep resonances for both the development of archaeology and anthropology more broadly, as it has close links to anthropological notions of ethnography. Indeed, ethnographic analogy has become one of the foundational toolkits in archaeological interpretation (Wylie 1988, 2002). Inherent to Pausanias’ method, however, is omission: selecting necessitates choosing between, and the recognition of this led to several polarizing debates regarding the author’s reliability. Pausanias is integral to the birth of classical archaeology—the discipline emerged from the notion that there was truth in texts that could be traced materially. These early debates shaped the idea of what constitutes an archaeological resource.
By tracing the impact of autopsy on approaches to landscape history, this chapter illuminates the impact of textually-based analyses of material culture to contemporary understandings of Greece. The tension between Pausanias’ model of selecting what to describe and his aspiration towards comprehensiveness is central to understanding how some of the key aspects of classical archaeology in Greece developed. The chapter interrogates ethnography, analogy and autopsy to assess how they have been used in classical archaeology. Frazer’s impact on the cross-fertilization between classical archaeology and cultural anthropology comes primarily in his opposition to the German view of Pausanias’ uselessness and in his comparative analogical approach to the study of culture. That legacy is still present within contemporary practice of classical archaeology.